Hasta La Gadget!

I admit it, I was getting worried. After the original Project Glass concept video promised far, far more than the wearable could deliver, and then the public tidbits from Googlers pointed to little more than a hands-free camera and the occasional email notification, I started to suspect Google had entirely dropped the ball with Glass. Less wearable computer, and more strap-a-Pebble-to-your-face.

Now there’s nothing wrong with making smartphone notifications more useful or easy to consume: that, after all, is why interest in Pebble and other smartwatches has been so high. Yet the initial promise of Glass had been so much more than that, harnessing the power of Android and ubiquitous connectivity and wearer-attention to augment your daily life in persistent ways a smartphone could never manage.

Okay, so the first promo video was ridiculously far-fetched, but as time went on – and the Google team members lucky enough to have access to Glass prototypes teased us with photos, videos, and sky-dives filmed using the headset – it began to look more like Glass was a camera first rather than a wearable computer. Those fears were compounded after early hands-on reports began to trickle out, with talk of little more than email alerts and other notifications dropping into the corner of your vision.

That seemed, frankly, a waste, and so it’s great to see a more realistic explanation of what Glass will do in Google’s new campaign. The display isn’t just a notification pane, it turns out, but a proper screen (albeit transparent) capable of showing Google search results, color navigation directions, and more.

Google Glass walkthrough:

Best of all, it’s very much a two-way stream of information. Glass isn’t just showing you data and then expecting you to pull out your phone to respond to it, as per most smartwatches we’ve seen, but uses voice commands of impressive complexity to operate. The instruction “OK Glass” apparently wakes the headset up, and then you can ask for Google searches, photographs and video, and even for language translations, with the headset discretely whispering the foreign phrases in your ear.

In fact, there’s little suggestion that the trackpad on the side of Glass plays much part, with Google showing only voice commands to navigate through the modified Android OS. It’s worth noting that the video chops together only the key features, however; the actual transitions between them – jumping back to whatever homescreen Glass has, and stepping through pages of search results, for instance – isn’t shown. That may well demand some touchpad stroking. There’s also the question of whether Glass works with touch controls alone, or if you have to give it vocal instructions: that could undermine discrete use of the headset, in situations when speaking out loud isn’t really acceptable. At least one of the pictures Google has freshly released today shows what appears to be an eye-tracking camera on the inside of the eyepiece.

“This isn’t really augmented reality”

One thing that’s clear already is that this isn’t really “augmented reality“, at least not as we generally conceive of it. Glass doesn’t modify your view of the world, or do any clever floating of glyphs or data around people or objects in your eyeline; it can’t change the way you see things. Instead, it’s more akin to a smartphone that’s been squeezed, extruded, and generally reshaped to fit your face rather than in your pocket: assisting your hunt for digital information, yes, but leaving it up to you as to how it integrates into your life.

Google seems keen to involve more than just developers in the latest round of Glass Explorer Edition presales; whereas only coders had the chance to slap down $1,500 back at Google I/O 2012, this time around the company tells us it’s looking for a more diverse group. In fact, the #ifihadglass campaign doesn’t even require those 8,000 picked to commit to producing their application suggestions. Instead, they’ll be selected on the basis of creativity, the social reach of them having devices (i.e. the scale of the audience they could preach the good Glass message to), and how compelling and original their ideas are.

There’s still plenty to be learned about Glass. Google has teased its cloud-based engine for the headset, but has otherwise said little about the development environment involved, and the biggest concern – battery life – is still conspicuously overlooked anytime the search giant mentions wearables publicly. We also don’t know when the Explorer Edition headsets will be released, though Google tells us that those people who ordered at Google I/O last year are first in line to get their units. Still, the huge amount of “geek” interest bodes well for the commercial launch, whenever that might be, and while Glass may not be the mainstream push for augmented reality we initially expected, the potential is still there to change the way we interact with the world – real, and digital – forever.

Good news: Google Glass isn’t just Pebble on your face is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Sometimes an accent is needed to play a character from a different nationality or time period.

Though some Hollywood stars smoothly transform, others have struggled to give convincing performances. From Leonardo DiCaprio in “Blood Diamond” to Angelina Jolie in “Alexander,” some actors have gone painfully wrong. Even classic films like “Mary Poppins” aren’t immune to the dialect failure — Dick Van Dyke’s weak cockney accent made viewers want to stick their heads in a chimney.

What other actors have been deemed accent destroyers? Take a look through the slideshow below for 10 of the worst movie accents.

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Mandy Moore will star in “Pulling” at ABC, according to Deadline.com. This is Moore’s third pilot in the last two development seasons.

Deadline.com reports Moore will play Louise, one of three female leads who is living her life the way she wants to. The character is optimistic and wants a husband badly, but her tactics tend to backfire. The show is based on the British series and the pilot was written by Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky.

This is Moore’s third ABC pilot in two years. Earlier this development season she was attached to a put pilot comedy from Rich Appel. Last year she co-starred in a pilot about a newlywed couple who open a restaurant and struggle to balance their real family and friends who have become like family.

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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer took to the company’s official blog to unveil a refreshed Yahoo homepage that’s “more intuitive and personal.” The basic layout hasn’t changed all that much (and the real deal hasn’t switched over just yet), but Meyer says that the site is now optimized across mobile devices, with newly designed apps able to tap into your Facebook profile to broadcast your friends’ birthdays to this new, more social-centric homepage. Recommendations from the social network are also gifted space on the new entry page, but it’s email and news that seem to take priority in the redesign, located in eye-catching positions on both desktop and mobile iterations. The CEO added that Yahoo isn’t finished yet, noting that the redesign we’re looking at above is “the first of many.” The new look will roll out across US browsers over the next few days.

Filed under: Internet, Mobile

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Source: Yahoo

We first heard about the YotaPhone back in December, and to say the least, we were pretty intrigued by its unique design. The company has finally announced that they have found a manufacturer in Singapore and are now planning to officially launch the phone sometime during the second half of this year.

While the folks behind the YotaPhone are based in Russia, the phone will actually be manufactured in Singapore by Hi-P International. They’re not as well-known as, say, Foxconn, but they’ve built products for top companies in the past, including Apple, BlackBerry, and Amazon (their e-readers, specifically).

The Russian company will also be opening up a research and development center in Singapore to not only stay within close quarters of the phone’s manufacturer, but to also help research “subsequent generations of YotaPhone,” which means that we’ll see updates to the YotaPhone every 1 to 2 years or so.

We got our hands on on the YotaPhone last month during CES, and we really liked it to say the least. It’s definitely a weird concept, and certainly something you don’t see every day, but we really liked its solid build. It has two 4.3-inch displays, one of which is a normal LCD screen and the other, which is a constantly-on e-ink display to show information without eating up the battery.

[via Engadget]

YotaPhone to be made in Singapore, launching later this year is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.